AI Visibility Study · September 2026

AI Visibility Study: AI is citing the answers businesses publish

  • 12,792 AI answers
  • 3,127 business websites
  • 8 service industries
  • 12 US metros

When someone asks AI about a service, whose information becomes the answer?

We tested which businesses 3 AI models named, compared their websites with businesses the models never named, and examined the pages cited when buyers asked about costs and choices.

The mission was to understand what actually works to get AI to recommend your business, and what is just hype.

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Key findings

59.6%

AI named the business with more content in 6 of 10 matchups with the same service, same city and similar reviews.

To compare like with like, we paired businesses head to head: same service, same city, similar number of Google reviews. In 59.6% of those pairs, the business AI named had more website pages.

That is not a coin flip. The difference is statistically significant.

348 pairs, 4 ties excluded. Clearest when AI answered from existing knowledge; the web search comparison was inconclusive.

57.9% vs 70.6%

The buyer's question decides which page AI links to.

Ask who to hire: 57.9% of the business links AI referenced were homepages.

Ask what it costs or which option to choose: 70.6% of the local-business pages AI linked to were pages with answers or pricing. That is 7 out of every 10 pages: articles, FAQs and pages explaining prices.

Different question sets and samples: 739 links to business websites on hiring questions, 177 local-business pages on cost and comparison questions.

36.0%

Local businesses' own websites were the biggest source AI cited on cost and comparison questions.

More than 1 in 3 pages AI cited came from local businesses' own websites (36.0%). That was more than cost-guide sites, national firms and blogs combined (32.3%), and more than 5 times the share from directories (6.7%).

288 answers to cost and comparison questions with web search on; 492 page citations.

55%

55% of the local businesses AI linked to were not in the first 60 Google Maps results.

When buyers asked about costs and choices, AI linked to the websites of 129 local businesses. 71 of them did not appear in the first 60 Google Maps results we collected for their service and city.

Maps results depend on the query, location and collection time. “Local” includes businesses elsewhere in the same state.

7 of 96

More reviews didn't win. The review leader was AI's top pick in just 7 of 96 markets.

Reviews still matter. But having the most reviews rarely made a business the one AI named most often.

AI's existing knowledge, with web search turned off.

99 vs 44

The businesses AI named had more than twice as much website content.

The typical business AI named had 99 pages on its website. The typical business AI never named had 44. The named businesses also had 5 pages answering buyer questions or comparing options. The others had 1.

“Typical” means the middle business in each group. We counted pages, not words.

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How we did it

Our investigation had 3 stages

1

Ask which businesses AI names

From September 5–8, 2026, we collected 12,504 answers from 3 AI models. The main experiment used 248 distinct questions, repeated across 4 days, including commercial service questions and control questions.

2

Compare the businesses' websites

We collected 5,426 Google Maps listings across the 96 local markets, each covering a service in a city. From those, 3,127 businesses had readable lists of their website pages.

3

Ask the questions buyers consider before hiring

On September 10, we asked 16 cost and comparison questions across 6 cities, using the same 3 models with web search enabled. That produced 288 additional answers.

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